Morgan McLaughlin Mrs. Butt English 9-8 16 November 2022 Bread: How Comfort Food causes Suffering in Elie Wiesel’s Night In society today, bread is a delicious comfort food that brings people warmth and joy. However, in Night Elie Wiesel uses the recurring motif of bread to reveal that individuals will do anything for a chance of survival. In the text, bread is used by Wiesel to describe individuals’ willingness to get what they want. When Stein, Elie’s relative, was told by the Wiesel’s that his wife and two sons were still alive, he was so grateful that “from time to time, [he] [brought]” Elie and his father “a half portion of bread” (44). This highlights that by lying to Stein, it earned food for the Wiesel's and helped Elie and his father live. A second example is when Elie was liberated on April 10th, the thing the free thought about was “only of bread” (115). All the former prisoners cared about was food, not their family or revenge. These two quotes demonstrate how people are greedy, only thinking about food. …show more content…
When Elie first arrived in Buna, his tent leader “had bread brought out for [the children]” (48). While this may seem like a nice gesture, it was to bribe the kids with food, something they desperately needed, in order for his tent leader to have sex with the kids. The last example is when the POWs were being transported by cart, the officers thought it would be funny to “take a piece of bread out of [their] bag[s] and [throw] it into a wagon” (100). The appearance of bread after starvation drove many to go psycho, “trampling, tearing at and mauling each other” (101). These examples illustrate how bread is used as bribery to cause further